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LAN & WAN Reviews

Installation and Setup, Continued

One of the first things you'll need to do is get your network interfaces working. This can be one of the trickiest parts of the whole installation. You'll need to know what your network cards are and then figure out which driver they need to work. LBU also supports dialup, by the way, if you're dealing with a phone modem.

While working out all of your hardware, "cat /proc/pci" and Google are your friends. Once you have the correct modules loaded, then you've got to figure out which interface has been assigned eth0, which has been assigned eth1, and so on. Sometimes it's not the way you'd think. Finally, when you've got your network interfaces straightened out, then it's time to configure the rest of the system. The LBU configuration utility is helpful, but mostly what it does is help you navigate to the configuration files, and then dump you into an editor, like this.

Figure 3: The Configuration Utility

Now I know that none of this looks very sexy to folks who are used to pointing-and-clicking their way through life, but this is a firewall, not a video game. As I mentioned before, most all of the configuration files are very well commented, so along with the installation and user's guides I mentioned earlier, getting a basic working system up and running is fairly straightforward. Be sure to use the configuration utility, as shown below, to backup (save permanently) all your changes.

Figure 4: Backing up the Configuration

Since I personally just don't trust floppy disks, I chose to store my LBU system on the firewall's hard disk. It's really just a matter of adding modules or a ready-made package to support IDE drives, and then moving everything to a MSDOS partition on the hard disk. The LBU documentation explains all of this.

Another one of the great things about LBU is the available extra packages. If you don't like the default DHCP server, there's another one you can try, or maybe you'd like to run an NTP server, or set up a VPN tunnel. New packages are easy to download, install, and try out, and just as easy to get rid of if you don't like them.